Morgan Powell
The Common Root: performed by the Tone Road Ramblers with text and vocals by Phoebe Leger
(EIN 016/CD)

Morgan Powell’s newest CD richly rewards eager ears, a wide-open imagination, and a sense of wonder. In the twenty-five-minute title cut, “The Common Root of all Organisms,” Powell sets out to span all geological time in a single composition, ingeniously following in Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” A consequential idea lightly launched is the hallmark of this heterodox composer who declines to distinguish between jazz and classical or high and low styles, or even between lyricism and artful pandemonium. His demurral creates feasts of invention for his listeners.

Phoebe Legere’s text about evolution sounds changes from coolest scientific to outright hip. She voices this over music shifting between scored and improvised, played by the Tone Road Ramblers. Legere is known as a soprano of extraordinary range and purity. Here she bicycles through the miscellaneous cosmic history under many dramatic personae, from gamine to schoolmarm to termagant. Like Powell, Legere slurs and slides across boundaries, hers verbal and generic. She turns the matters of mitochondria and spirochete into a fairy tale with an ultimate moral about brotherly love. As she spins her myth, the Ramblers brilliantly apply themselves to music that is far less romantic than the text, music suggestive of Nature’s chaos and contingency. Such well-informed dissonance between text and music exists also through “The Prairie,” a thirty-minute work that continues the CD’s thematic preoccupation with the natural world.

The second tune, sandwiched between the longer ones, adds Legere’s lyrics in German to a 1974 Powell trombone solo work. “Inacabado: Second Chance,” is performed here by Jim Staley and Legere. The “super sexy” love song brings us relief from concerns about the fate of the earth when our soprano trills, “I need a cup of Sugar/Can’t you hear me knocking?”

The Tone Road Ramblers are John Fonville, flutes; Eric Mandat, clarinet; Ray Sasaki, trumpet and flugelhorn; Jim Staley and Morgan Powell, trombones, and Steve Butters, percussion. The virtuoso skills of each only contribute to the cohesion, grace, and naturalness of this extraordinary ensemble’s playing. Lacking that cohesiveness built over years of playing together, the excitement of this difficult music could have been lost to precisely the chaos it is Powell’s art and discipline to suggest.

The Ramblers were expanded for The Common Root by saxophonist Howie Smith of the Cleveland Orchestra and Cleveland Jazz Orchestra; Armand Beaudoin, cello and bass, who has been sideman to Mary Lou Williams and others; and violinist Dorothy Martirano, concertmistress of the Champaign-Urbana Symphony. Martirano’s contributions stand out in every instance for the beauty, technique, and expression of her playing.

Ann Starr
Columbus, Ohio